Pre-2017

The Adult Fear present in this series is pretty damn scary. Realizing that your parents are highly dangerous crooks who give absolutely no shits about you and are going to exploit the hell out of out you simply for their own gain is hard to take. Then becoming runaways and having no idea how to survive on your own (even with having jobs, it'd still be hard to make ends meet since people aren't looking for teens to have full-time jobs, excepting of course some...shadier jobs).

Even worse, their parents do care about them... which is the entire reason they continue with their plan to help the Gibborim destroy the world. So their kids can inherit it. And later, the Yorks parents are willing to blow up a chunk off New York in the past, after learning that Gert died.

Alex may have been a traitor, but Nico still didn't feel he deserved to die. She even tried a Resurrection spell to bring him back but it didn't work.

Gert's death in Issue 18 of Volume 2.

Made worse for Chase since he saw her future-self die in the 1st Issue of Volume 2 and was working to prevent that. Instead, she died even earlier.

And then there's Old Lace's sudden cruel death in the "Homeschooling" arc, and Chase's subsequent Heroic B.S.O.D. where he's doubled over on the floor.

"Gert. I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry. Come back. Please come back."

Victor loses his mom shortly after he finds out he's the son of Ultron, so not only did he have the experience of finding out he was related to a villain and was programmed to be one in the future, but he loses the only other family he has.

Volume 3, Issue Six ends with Xavin giving themself up, masquerading as Karolina, so Karolina will be able to stay on Earth with the other Runaways. Xavin willingly went with the Majesdanians in place of Karolina. The flashback shown makes it even more heartbreaking, Karolina doesn't want Xavin to go and they share one last kiss. Made worse because Xavin has never been seen since (and Volume 3 was released in 2009).

The third series had a hell of a Downer Ending: Chase is critically wounded, Old Lace is dead, and Nico has decided to flip off the only person with any interest in helping them. Klara points out how dire their situation is, and all Nico can do is offer halfhearted platitudes about how things will get better; the next page shows Klara curled up in a little ball of misery, suggesting that such platitudes did not work, and the very last page shows Chase on life support...

2017 Series

Just seeing Nico alone and struggling to light a stove to cook noodles is a farcry from someone who had been part of two hero teams, both of which cared about her.

Victor got drawn in by the Avengers and was killed during The Vision (2015). Chase points out they don't even know how he died.

If that wasn't bad enough, they sent Chase a box of Victor's personal affects, only for Chase to open it and find his head.

Then the state came and took Klara, no doubt because Chase probably wasn't qualified to look after her after the above incidents.

Molly was taken in by her grandmother.

Karolina went off on her own since she had nothing left.

Gert herself is floored because she thought that they would always be a family, and that she considered herself the expendable member. Chase points out that wasn't the case:

Chase: It was you all along, Gert. When we lost you, that's when everything started to fall apart.

Issue 3: Nico mentions that the others keep her grounded, keep her from feeling like she's become a bad person. So once all of them were gone, she felt herself falling into despair, so she'll go with Chase and Gert no matter what since she has nothing left.

Karolina starts the day happy. By the end she's curled up and sad as she tells her friends that she won't come with them.

Gert feels out of place. Her friends grew up and left her behind, so she's not only younger than them but to her it seems like Chase is just a grown man who ate her boyfriend yesterday. She can't bring herself to be with him since he's too old for her now, in her eyes.

Gert: You came back for me. But you didn't wait for me. (...) We aren't... anything now. We can't be. But just yesterday, in my time, you were my...

Issue 5: Victor complains about being revived by stating that he didn't ask for it after how he died, showing he still felt guilt over what he did to his nephew.

Issue 6: Molly is constantly torn between her grandmother and her friends during the conflict, not wanting either side to harm the other. She clearly doesn't want to really leave her grandmother, but then she finds out that her her grandmother cloned her mother and that she intended to bring her father back too. It becomes too much for Molly to take so she simply jumps out of the window with Gert and leaves the other behind while she cries.

For her Grandmother's part, she simply wanted her children and grandchildren back so she was going to an extreme end to get them back. You can see how she still blames the pride children for sending them to their deaths, an accusation that manages to get to them since they still did love their parents even if they were evil. They ultimately make a decision to have the Avengers take her in because she'd keep coming after Molly and she was cloning super-villains.

Community

Tropes HQ

TVTropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy